Gomez Addams, Donald Trump and the Art of Failing

One of the towering characters of 1960s television comedy, Gomez Addams, the pencil-mustachioed patriarch of the Addams Family, had a certain genius for business.

For younger readers who perhaps have not enjoyed the benefits of a classical education, here is a short bit of dialogue from a 1965 episode of “The Addams Family.” In it, Gomez reminds his wife, Morticia, of his brilliance in having hired an executive to run part of the Addams empire.

“Remember?” Gomez says. “Took a failing company, and in three months, ran it into bankruptcy!”

“Dear,” Morticia says, tenderly stroking his face. “You could have done it in one month.”

Gomez and his household would have been New York taxpayers, since the Addamses lived in a spooky mansion that had been in the family for 200 years and was built somewhere in Central Park.

Though his tax returns probably weren’t part of the series, you can safely guess he had enough in losses to join the elite group of New Yorkers who make plenty of money but don’t pay income taxes on it. That group might very well include Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee for president.

The most recent records show that 32,000 households with businesses in the city reported “negative income” for 2013, according to Michael Jacobs, supervising analyst for economics and taxes with the city’s Independent Budget Office.

That is, they declared their taxable income from all sources — businesses, salaries, interest — to be less than zero. Of that group, 24,300 households also reported $904 million in capital gains. Not a penny of those capital gains were taxed by the city or state, thanks to the offsetting losses.

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John Astin as Gomez Addams.

Like Gomez Addams, Mr. Trump’s tax returns are not public, but a recent report in The New York Times showed that he claimed a $916 million loss for 1995, around the time his business empire had nearly collapsed. Such a loss could be used to cover tax liabilities on other income for 18 years. As The Times reported, these “net operating losses” are a legal tax detour heavily trodden by the well-off.

“Mr. Trump has lots of company — many other New Yorkers with millions in salaries, dividends and capital gains are not paying any New York City income taxes,” said James Parrott, chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute, a think tank in New York.

Because Mr. Trump is in the real estate business, he also partakes of that industry’s special depreciation benefits, which are another means of lightening or erasing tax burdens. This, too, is legal. Some things are newsworthy because they are against the law; others, because they are not. The political treasuries of both parties in the New York State Legislature are packed with real estate money. In effect, the State Senate was, and is, a leasehold of the industry.

The extravagant Gomez Addams, a creation of the cartoonist Charles Addams, spends $1,000 a month on cigars. Gomez’s genius and business acumen lead him to invest in such prizes as a buzzard farm, a swamp (with “scenic views!”), a tombstone factory. Yet he continued to have fantastic luck. The loving Morticia praised him as a “failure at failing.”

Mr. Trump over the years has used cash, other people’s money and his gilded name as capital for such ventures as an unaccredited online school that was called a “university,” and has ceased operations — temporarily, he says, while he fights lawsuits that argue it was a swindle; a line of steaks that is no longer sold, though he held a news conference this year posing with cuts of meat that were actually props bought from a butcher; Trump Vodka, also no longer sold, despite Mr. Trump’s prediction that a Trump and Tonic would be the most popular cocktail in America; and an airline, a mortgage company, and casinos, all of which were shuttered or went broke.

These and his real estate interests have provided Mr. Trump with legal tax dodges on a stupendous scale.

We might understand all this better if, years ago, television’s Gomez Addams had disclosed his own tax returns, to explain how he had failed at failing.

Then again, Gomez never ran for president.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: ’60s TV, Taxes and a Taste of Trump. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe